Destiny is to first-person shooters what Watch Dogs was to third-person action games. Great mechanics and good intentions which are ruined by idiotic ideas and rushed execution.
Do you remember when we used to sink hours, evenings and weekends into videogames because they were fun? Destiny has ensured that we forget those days and instead sacrifice all of our time to the Altar Of Unsatisfactory Grinding. All hail the almighty Cryptarch and his masochistic love of rendering our time wasted, bow down before Xur and his unearthly love of Strange Coins. Bungie is incapable of changing or fixing Destiny for the better, because it itself sacrificed its soul to Activision in an effort to go rogue from Microsoft.
Destiny still has a severe lack of content that is just a straight-up fact. Even now, more than six months after launch, its abundantly clear that the game wasnt finished not by full retail release standards, at least. Bungie conjured and unleashed a bleak illusion with Destiny that other publishers will now try to replicate for years, and why wouldnt they? Bungie has cleverly taken a handful of woefully pedestrian story and Strike missions, and successfully dragged them out over hundreds of hours of gameplay. All because you are locked into a slow-burn, badly designed leveling system and the promise that itll be worth it eventually.
But can you honestly say that youre still enjoying the ceaseless repetition, the maddening upgrade system, the disastrously shallow set of missions and the horribly exclusive expansion? If you are, then youre either a liar or a lunatic, because Id wager my bank of Radiant Shards that you are just enjoying something you can play with your buddies. Heres the kicker: even Fuse was fun with friends. All youre doing now is contributing to prolonging the lifeline of a game that should have died a month after launch. But Destiny wasnt designed to be a great game; it has been designed to force you into a cycle of sinking time into something that offers nothing in return. And to get you to willingly sink more cash into, under-developed DLC drops sorry, expansion packs releasing at an alarming rate, of course.
Bungie knows this. Hell, the studio so confused by its own loot system and end game had you re-level all of your Exotic items barely three months in: that isnt iterative, it is exploitative. If World Of Warcraft had pulled that shit on its players, it wouldnt have just celebrated its tenth anniversary. The Dark Below is so underdeveloped and rushed that players were able to decimate Crota, the games toughest enemy, by pulling out a bloody LAN cable. That isnt a clever hack youve discovered, thats some serious SOCOM II, 2003-era of online gaming oversight right there.
If youre playing Destiny for the sake of it, stop. Want a great shared-world shooter? Play Defiance. Want an awesome MMO on your PS4? Play Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Want a killer FPS? Dig out Killzone Shadow Fall. If youre looking for a game that blends all of those together appropriately, give Destiny three or four years. Because right now, the game is offering some seriously negative vibes, and that isnt likely to change. Its a game without a soul, devoid of interesting hooks or fun past the first run through its content. There used to be a time when wed bemoan games that launched so broken and unfulfilling that players were forced to find ways to destroy the loot system and glitch the handful of bosses to death within seconds to keep them fun. Now, we celebrate them. I worry about what that says about the quality of games the industry as a whole is producing.